Little League Baseball

Little League Baseball---hearing those words conjures up great memories from my childhood. My summers were consumed with baseball from the age of 5 to 18. This year my son decided to play again after a 5 year hiatus; he hasn’t played since t-ball. Well, after 6 games I’m a lot less enthusiastic and almost to the point of finding it excruciatingly painful to watch.

My son is doing great as far as I’m concerned. He’s made some nice fielding plays; he has struck out a number of times, but man he’s aggressive and takes his whacks; he’s shown a great attitude in the disappointments. The problem is that the team has no wins and has been outscored about 180-30. The frustrating part is that of the 180, about 150 of the runs scored have been in this mode: walk-stolen bases-passed ball-score. His team does not have one kid who can throw the ball over the plate consistently. Every other team has at least one or two kids who can at least keep it in the catcher’s range.

Naturally, my recollection is that we played a whole lot better back when; of course playing baseball was all we had to do growing up in Apple Valley in the 60’s. We were a housing development surrounded by a sea of corn fields back then. My son is turning 11 and has played 6 games and has 4-5 practices under his belt. When I turned 11, I had probably played about 150 games of organized ball, and probably about 2000 hours of unorganized ball. We played hardball, softball, mushball, whiffleball, rubberball; if it was round and we had a bat, we played ball with it, that’s what we did every day of the summer.

This summer my son is playing baseball; then he’s going to play some soccer, he has Boy Scouts on Monday and will be going to camp for a week in July; he has church group on Wednesdays and they’re going camping and rafting; we have him enrolled in YMCA day camps throughout the summer; he has flute lessons on a weekly basis; he’ll be going to library at the park activities; there’s a swimming pool two blocks away, and he loves to swim; he has his PS2 and is on about the 15th level of flying an F16 in combat. There’s certainly no shortage of things to fill up his days.

I’m just going to continue to go and cheer my son and his team on; even though deep inside I’m wishing I was 11 again. It’s like the Springsteen song—Glory Days; they pass us by, but they still live in our minds.